


Angles and Curves

by SLWalker



Category: due South
Genre: Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, Slice of Life, Yearning, idyll
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-15 17:44:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17533325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker
Summary: On a cold Chicago day, Fraser reflects on both of the worlds he knows.





	Angles and Curves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Arduinna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arduinna/gifts).



> It's short, but hopefully sweet. <3 Hope it suits, Arduinna!

Chicago was cut from angular grays; the leaden sky above the city, broken by the sharp geometry of buildings, was a far cry from the mountain peaks and dark evergreens and wide, vast, cold expanses of his own youth. The slab of granite reaching for the sky, versus the glacier doing the same; one forced into shape by man and one hewn from wind and precipitation and time.

Even now, Ben still sometimes longed deeply for that. It wasn't quiet up there; the wind told stories. But in Chicago, there was noise and motion and mass, and thousands of bodies crushed together.

Both had their patterns. Ben spent as much of his time baffled by those of Chicago as he did applying those found in nature to the city, and the translation wasn't always an easy one.

Still, he sat in the passenger's seat of the Riviera, his stetson resting on the dash, and peered out. The sky threatened snow, coming off of the lake, and for a wistful, petulant flash, he yearned for the cold clean of the North; a place where the field of snow remained white and wouldn't be turned to rock salt and slush and grit, and absent the cursing of angry city-dwellers before it could even finish settling. Where for every one of nature's angles, one could find a delicate curve.

But the wistfulness and the petulance faded on the flap of something caught in the wind; instead of the cold angles of buildings and streets, a living fluidity, a spot of something natural and naturally beautiful, and all the moreso because the beauty was unconscious.

Ray Vecchio came down the sidewalk, head ducked to the shearing wind that whipped his long coat out like a flag; even without being able to hear him, Ben could form the patter of irritated, accented Chicago muttering between his own ears. Despite the wind and hard, molded concrete, his gait rolled, a silent grace Ray seemed to never realize he had.

In his hands were two cups, and one with the tag from a teabag fluttering, spinning, against the side of it. Another kind of grace.

Chicago was particularly bitter, in winter. In the summer, the city heated and the air lay thick, but it was so outside of Fraser's realm of experience that it was more akin to being a stranger on a strange world; in the winter, though, the winds compressed and sliced their unnatural angles between buildings. It was enough to recognize as a world he _should_ know, but sideways.

But as Ray got into the car, grousing-  _"-figure we'll have six inches of this crap by morning; yeah, I know, that ain't the same thing as fifty feet of snow in two seconds like you're used to, but that doesn't mean I have to like it-"_  -and handed him the cup of tea, brought specifically because he preferred it, Ben just watched him and smiled, taking in Ray's bottle-green eyes and his elegant, round features (the delicate curve of his pouting bottom lip; the slope of his brow, the broad tip of his nose) and thought of the beauty one could find even in the hardest angles of the city.


End file.
